


Superposition

by BlueColoredDreams



Series: Quantum Entanglement [4]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Thrall - Freeform, spoilers up to ep.67
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 10:55:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11553720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueColoredDreams/pseuds/BlueColoredDreams
Summary: Observation: Resistance to communication, lackluster response to danger and shock. Muttering. Pallor and shaky movements.Hypothesis: This is the same thing that happened to his mother.Conclusion: Lucretia Miller is under the thrall of a Grand Relic—her staff, at least, and all the others as well by now—and has been, probably, for the last three years. If not longer.





	Superposition

**Author's Note:**

> What's linear storytelling even, psshaww. Love saves the day cheese? Yep. Got it in spades.  
> Can theoretically be read without Quantum Entanglement, but Lucas makes reference to a couple of things covered in the first few chapters (and... a lot that's not! surprise I spoiled my own thing!)  
> QE was never really supposed to cover past CK but, at the same time, I had a burning _what if_ that I had to write. Had to. Just. Gotta do it man, gotta do it! This is so not gonna be canon-compliant, lol

Lucas sees the chaos unfold in real time, across several planes, and he knows that it's time; getting out and up to the Bureau headquarters isn't that hard to do. What's difficult is actually breaking _into_ the base, despite the fact that he'd designed the whole security system himself. (Which, honestly, is why it's difficult.) 

He’s never regretted not having a bracer until now—he’s never regretted doing anything, not really. Not even the disaster that was his feeble attempts at necromancy. He’d do it all over again if he had to, he meant it—sometimes he still wakes up and thinks, _I could do it_ and knows it’s not his voice talking—it’s the whisper of the Stone, it’s the whispering of grief and loneliness, it’s the echoes of looking up, up at the sky each night, and knowing he can’t go back, not yet, not yet.

But here he is—not yet has become _now, now, c’mon_ , as he tries to slide a screwdriver into the security panel into the main quad. He swears as it skids off of the metal and the mechanism spits sparks at him from the small crack between the front plating and the internal device. Of all the places he could have picked to break into, it’s the one with the highest security rating on the whole base.

_Way to go, batting ten for ten here, Miller._

“Where the fuck is Lucretia when you need her to blow up a door,” he grumbles, sorrow welling up into his throat to heat his face.

The last time he was here… the last time he was here was after Maureen had died—before he’d managed to find her, extract her, and chain-start the events that led to his exile back down at the empty lab in the Wilds. He’s certainly not in a position to be requesting for entry, and they’re certainly not in a state to be even be policing who’s hailing them. He hopes Lucretia didn’t have any agents out on the field—he doesn’t even want to think about what would happen if whatever’s attacking the base got a good swipe at one of the glass balls (he’d always meant to make them safer, always meant to do something better for them, but he just forgot—too late, too late now).

He sighs and starts the long process of wriggling the plate off, trying to bite back the growing horror at the sounds of combat from the hallways. He pries it off and sticks his hand inside, fishing around for the bundled wires that carry both the electric and arcane currents that power the base.

“Uh, _shit_ —it was… blue and green, then… y…yellow?” he mutters, fingers fumbling with the wires. It’d been over two years now, and they’d configured it slightly different from the lab so the base wouldn’t have the power issue that the lab did—once Maureen shut off half the laboratory making tea on a Bunsen burner while he’d booted up the preliminary divination spell that would go on to power Hodgepodge at the same time, and Lucretia had been so furious with them both for being careless with the power distributions. “Yellow, fuck it.”

He tugs, and at the same time the wires pop free, the world is illuminated bright white—there’s a dull roar of sound dampened by the dome, and he can feel it even through the glass, hot and sudden and he can’t tell if it’s just his eyes misfiring in the afterimage or if there are actual fucking fireworks, but the door is open, and he sits there for a second, holding the ripped-free wires in his hands, blinking.

“That… definitely was not me,” he whispers, more to the ghost of his mother scolding him than anyone in particular. “Definitely. For once.”

He stops dead on the quad, looking at the destruction before him; he had some idea, some inkling, from what he’d seen in his mirrors, salvaged from the old lab, and from what he’d heard secondhand from Maureen, who’d heard it from Lucretia. And then from the journals he’d stolen in his search for the Stone, but he can’t see it, he can’t see the Hunger, the biggest part of the puzzle that pulled his mother and Lucretia apart so badly. He knows some things, remembers others as hazy memories and the sound of Maureen’s voice, low and angry and he remembers the static and knowing that Lucretia crossed a line with Maureen, but he’s not sure what she did.

He didn’t think to sneak a vial to find out when he'd trespassed into Lucretia's private office ages ago, not like Maureen had (the fight after had been tremendous—it was loud and ugly, and Lucretia left and did not come back for weeks and weeks—his mother had cried for days, and he’d gone to plead for her to come back, come back, and Lucretia had lifted her head from her desk and shook her head, and the portrait over her desk was, it was… maybe that was it, he thinks, the woman she was before them, maybe that was what the fight was about), so he couldn’t see it.

Nothing Lucretia could have told them would have prepared to see the remains of a battle where half o the participants were invisible. Guards, seekers, spies, all of them, regulator teams—people mill around, scattering and running and some of them are still, crimson spreading across the sky blue uniforms.

He knows these people. Some of them he helped recruit. Was this what his mother went through, back in Neverwinter? Watching her friends, her coworkers fall, one by one, to the grasp of the wars—and Lucretia, who had to deal with this every day, alone. Maureen at least had him, at least had his father, for a little while, before it all went to shit, but Lucretia…

He begins to realize just how terrible he’d been to her in the aftermath of Maureen’s death. She might not have been _right,_ but she’d been doing what she felt needed to be done, and he’d isolated her even further, cut her off from any chance for closure or grief, cut himself off, and this… This is unprecedented.  

He has to find her, has to. Lucretia will know what needs to be done, what’s going on, what he can do to help. He has to help her, because after this, after whatever this is is over, she’s going to need him—she’s going to be devastated.

It’s time for him to fulfill his promises; it’s time for him to do what his mother told him to do before she left for good.

Do good. Learn to forgive. Move forward.

It’s time.

But he’s still assumed dead—he’s still breaking into a base that’s not his. It’s not like it was months ago, where he could waltz in and out on Lucretia’s good graces. He doesn’t doubt for a second that the three Reclaimers and the Regulator team Lucretia sent in after him would punt him off the base if they saw him—invasion or not. He slips into a maintenance  hall that lines the edges of each dome, a labyrinth of tight spaces and wires—it’s really a glorified crawlspace, with access to the arcane cores and the air ducts and all the circuitry he and his mother had carefully overseen and drafted.

He crawls towards the main dome, to Lucretia’s offices, to the disposal chamber and her receiving room—she should be there, that’s where emergency meetings were supposed to be held. That’s where, as Maureen said—first fondly, and then with exasperation—she held her court. It’s both an evacuation chamber and auditorium and as he scoots forward on his stomach, he begins to hear the tail end of an argument.

_“Now, Lucretia… stop… it’s gonna be the end of the world if you—”_

He strains his ears, falling still as sweat begins to trickle down his neck.

_“—there’s nothing you can say that’s gonna make me stop this. I’m gonna save us all, I promise.”_

It’s Lucretia, but she doesn’t sound right, she sounds desperately hoarse with anguish and that’s not right for the situation, she always was in so much control when she needed to be the Director, to the point she could mask even the grief of losing Maureen—so why does she sound so manic?

_“Angus, you’re with me. You’re gonna help me sleuth out where Lucretia’s hiding out—”_

Hiding out? _Lucretia_? And is that voice… Davenport? Giving orders to… Bureau employees? And they're following them?

He mouths ‘the fuck’ to himself, scooting forward to peer through a vent, watching as the regulator group, the three morons, a man he’s never seen before, Davenport, Angus, and a… is that a fucking lich? Split apart into clear groups, Davenport issuing orders out to each of them in turn before leading Merle and Magnus, Angus following behind them after gaping after the red robed specter, towards Lucretia’s private offices.

He crawls as quietly as he can behind them. He rises to stand in the crawl space, elbows and knees sore. He slips through the passages that Lucretia had built in behind her offices, seeing the bygone relics of the times she and Maureen hid back here—an empty champagne glass, a dusty scarf, sketchbooks. He wonders if Lucretia even uses the passageways now that Maureen is gone—maybe, on occasion, to avoid doing paperwork.

There’s some scuffle in the office outside—he hears something indistinct, staticky, that makes him remember his mother and Lucretia shrieking in unison, and he’s sure it wasn’t in displeasure—but… He presses his ear close to the wall, hearing Magnus repeat the word ‘no’ several times, and more indistinct arguing that he can’t grasp, and he peers into the office through a small window masked by a fake portrait.

He watches them, seething as they start to upturn her office. He doesn’t have much room to judge, because he’d gone through it once or twice too, but the sheer disrespect being shown to her possessions— _at least put the journals back in their correct order, you fucking amateurs_.

He must have made some noise, because suddenly, Angus looks up. He pushes his cracked glasses up his nose, brow furrowing as his lips purse. He looks over at Davenport, then back—straight at Lucas.

He slowly (carefully, and where it came from) puts down the binder he’d been paging through. He makes his way slowly to the side of the room, stopping here and there to look at things, flipping papers and opening drawers, eyes sharp.

Lucas stands in place, and he makes a rash decision. He leans up to the fake portrait and Angus clambers up a table to be eye-to-eye with it.

“Is this… Is this Lucas Miller?”

“Yes,” he whispers. He doesn’t waste time wondering how Angus knows—he remembers what Lucretia had said, remembers the stories circulating around the base. Maybe this kid _is_ the world’s best detective, he doesn’t actually care—what he cares about is the fact that he knows this kid adores Lucretia, knows that whatever Davenport’s up to, this kid is more concerned about Lucretia. He knows Lucretia was teaching him about how the Bureau worked, knows that he very rarely left her side, knows that if he’s sharp enough to figure out where—and who—he is, then if he can convince him to help find Lucretia, then they’ll be okay.

“Is she in there?” Angus asks softly, looking behind him for a brief second.

“No.”

“Do you know where she’d be? Anywhere she would think was inherently safe, comforting?”

Lucas thinks, thinks about the blueprints and thinks about Lucretia. If she had to flee, where would she feel safe? His mind immediately goes to the lab he’d left that morning—the lab in the sky, too, but she would stay on base during an incursion. Even if everything else changed, even if she wasn’t the woman he and Maureen thought she was, even if she got twisted up in the weavings of her plans and goals, she would never leave the base if she felt it was in danger.

“In the library, there’s a conservatory that looks decorative. There’s a hidden entrance behind the rosebush; there’s a sequence of inset mechanisms. It’s a running key cipher with a shift of three attached. The key should be known to you,” he says quickly.

He knows that’s where she _has_ to be, knows that Maureen and Lucretia built it to look like the conservatory in the lab, knows it’s secret passage, knows that they spent time in the lush greenery, so much like Maureen’s overgrown garden down on the planet, in the lab and here on the base. He knows Lucretia feels safest in smaller places, knows she liked sitting outdoors rather than being cooped up.

Knows that his mother often told Lucretia that she fell in love in their garden, watching her among the foliage. They got married there, they spent time here—and on the moon, where else could there be such a garden but in that greenhouse?

Lucas is pleased to see Angus nod, rather than question. This is where it gets shaky—if Angus can’t figure out the key, then Lucas isn’t inclined to let him find Lucretia. But he doesn’t know how to shake Angus off of him in that event; he just has to trust his gut, trust Lucretia’s choices in protégés.

“Is she—is she okay?” he blurts out as Angus starts to scramble off of the table.

“…I don’t think so,” Angus says sadly.

Lucas doesn’t think about the noise it makes—he just takes off running towards the library.

He runs until he has to get on his hands and knees again, crawling through the winding ducts towards the library. He catches snippets of arguments, of whispers, of cries. He tries not to listen, tries to ignore the worst of the damage he knows is waiting outside of the passage’s walls.

As he nears the library, light begins to spill through the vents in the passage, blue and green and interplaying like an aurora and he just stops, rolls his eyes and waits with a huffing sigh, for whatever arcane experience is about to happen. It never rains, but pours, any time Lucretia is involved, it seems.

And then he remembers.

He remembers being on the ship, fiddling with the crystal that would ultimately become the Siphon, and he remembers first hearing Maureen shriek, then Lucretia—and at first he didn’t think anything of it, because if he did, he’d go running towards any number of less-than-wholesome displays of affection or attempts at pranks, but then they didn’t stop, both screaming like children at each other, and he remembers feeling more than a little amused upon finding them pointing back and forth at each other and shrieking nonsense, his mother’s glasses sliding down her nose and Lucretia on the floor with Fisher hovering between them, bell flickering as they keep pointing at it, then the tank and then, oh, _that’s_ what they were screaming about. Huh.

_Put it back, oh god, put it back!_

_I don’t think it can? That’s an egg—_

_I **know** what it **is** , Maureen! Fisher, put that **back** right now! You have to take it back, god, Magnus will murder me in my sleep once he remembers and realizes what’s happened, oh god—this isn’t happening, Maureen! Maureen, make Fisher put that back! _

_I can’t control your weird dog, Lucy— Lucy, stop, stop screaming for a second—_

And then, in the lab, listening to them argue, startled at the fact that they’ve raised their voices in anger:

_I can’t believe you did this, Lucretia._

_I can’t believe you broke into my office! Maureen, how could you, how could you even—you shouldn’t have been able—_

_I have records, Lucretia! I have notes, I keep logs just like you do!  Just because you made me forget that baby, doesn’t mean I don’t recognize that something was missing! How could you do this—what are you doing?! How could you!_

_I—I didn’t—Maureen, I forgot, I forgot, I—this is the only way, the only way, Maureen, and I just forgot to tell you—_

_You forgot to tell me you wiped my, oh fuck, **Lucas** —and, and, what did you **take** from us?_

_Not—it’s not, it’s nothing big, just—just the—the finer details about Fisher and the ship and the Hunger, and, and… okay. Okay, I know, I know and I—I fucked up the order, I’m, Maureen, Mar, **listen** —_

He’d left then, because he couldn’t understand what they were saying, and knew, knew Lucretia had done… something. But he’d also known that the tone of his mother’s voice was awful, the way it shook was terrible, and the disconnect between their voices and what he wasn’t hearing was unsettling. But he remembers now, realizes why Lucretia was so frustrated with him for repeating what his mother said in the lab: _Ask her what her Bureau is going to do if the Voidfish pops out a kid and makes them forget everything? Or worse, die; ask Lucy that, will you, Luke?_

Realizes how bitter his mother had become in her grief. It hurts, it hurts to think about her like this, because she was hurt, Lucretia had hurt her, and it was so easy, so easy to hurt Lucretia right back for making his mother cry, for hurting him too. But something’s not adding up right, something has been lost between the cracks and it scares him. He has to think of his mother as a person, not just the woman he built her up to be, because if he can’t, then he can’t help Lucretia, and she’s all he has left of his mother.

He remembers the Hunger, now, too—seeing the black columns with their fiery threads of color on the horizon as he made his way up to the base, remembers thinking it looks familiar, remembers the black shimmering mirror and…

“Oh shit,” he whispers. “Oh goddamn shit. Mom, mom, what did we do, what did we _do_ —?”

He pushes through the vent and tumbles out into the library, shaking dust and cobwebs off of his shabby coat, running through the stacks towards the center of the dome, where he can hear Angus bullshitting his way through some sort of explanation of the hidden mechanism for the door.

Kid’s clever, Lucas’ll give him that, but it’s really not that hard if you knew Lucretia in any sort of way, and thankfully, the kid does. It was laughably sentimental of her to set it up that way, but Maureen had found it funny, and it wasn’t like the conservatory was supposed to be opened by anyone but them. To everyone else, it was just a decorative room holding an experiment on low-oxygen, low-gravity, self-sustaining terrariums.

He skids around the corner just in time for the glass door to swing open—he gets a clear look at Lucretia for the first time in months, and it makes him sick.

She’s in the conservatory, alright—she kneels in the small cul-de-sac walkway that surrounds the remains of a fountain; something shattered it, and water burbles up and pools around her. It looks too bright in the light that surrounds her, from the light radiating off of her staff, like liquid mercury. It shimmers and sparks and how has no one noticed how _bad_ she looks?

He’s not in any place to judge, because Pan only knows he hasn’t been taking care of himself, but Lucretia— she shouldn’t look like this. Not here, on this base, not where she should be the ever-immaculate Director, who wryly smirks and snarks, who keeps her hands folded and keeps her robes well kept and stands straight. She shouldn’t, never, _ever_ : even if this wasn’t the Bureau library, she should be slouching against a counter, book in hand, sleeves rolled up her paint and ink-stained forearms, laughing. That’s how she should be, that’s how she’s supposed to be, not this, never like this.

There is no place in this world where she should be hunched like that, water and dirt and flecks of ash and blood and something black staining her cloak and robes, her face thin and drawn and heavily lined. Her eyes are sunken and it looks like maybe she hasn’t seen a good night’s sleep in _months,_ much less a good meal. Her skin looks ashen and her eyes are trained blankly ahead, mouth moving in silent motions. Maybe it’s a spell. Maybe it’s a prayer. Lucas doesn’t know, but as unsettling as it is to see, it’s even more horrific to realize he’s seen this before.

He’s seen this before, and dread rises up in him like it’s an illness.

She’s supposed to be above this. She’s supposed to be able to resist this. She’s had one of them for years, and she never—she never, right? She isn’t? Right?

He steps forward, dazed. He registers vaguely that Davenport is speaking, but Lucretia doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even look up. He starts to shout, at her, pleading, his hands open, but it’s like a roar of static to Lucas.

Only, it’s not Fisher, or Fisher’s child this time.

It’s shock.

He knows it’s shock, he remembers the exact same roar from the Cosmoscope, after finally breaking through the security encryption that had locked him out of Maureen’s first test. All he saw at first back then was her hand, outstretched from behind the lectern, palm up and fingers curled. He’d seen her hand like that before, when she slept at her workbench, head pillowed against her workbench, but somehow… he’d doubted she was asleep, then. That’s when it started crackling in his ears: static, a rushing roar that was neither wind nor his heartbeat. He knows the sound intimately—it’s all he heard for hours, until one of the bugbears came and found him (is it sad he can’t remember who anymore?).

There are more shouts, and she opens her mouth, and he hears her voice, but it’s _wrong_ , and in response, the ground around her shakes—the hanging planters shudder in the air, and one by one, they fall around her, bursting in midair around the globe of hazy white light that surrounds her. She doesn’t even flinch. Doesn’t even see them. Just keeps going, just keeps on.

He knows that he’s shutting down, knows that the realization that he’s stumbled upon, paired with the insistent fear of what’s happening and the lingering grief over his mother, is throwing him right back to the Cosmoscope and those awful, awful weeks after.

But it’s not the time, it’s not the time, not when he still has promises to fulfill. It’s not the time to crumble under the weight of it again, not when he’s in the position to _do_ something this time. A second chance to save the people he loves, and it’s not the time to be back in that dark room, kneeling over what used to be his mother.

So he separates himself from the situation—treats it like it’s an experiment. Treats it like he’s testing something, trying to prove a hypothesis. It’s cold, but it works. That’s what got him up and out of bed, what got him his mother’s final wishes. What brought him here.

Observation: Resistance to communication, lackluster response to danger and shock. Muttering. Pallor and shaky movements.

Hypothesis: This is the same thing that happened to his mother.

Experiment: Uncontrolled variables—outside parties provided extreme stimulus, no reaction. 

Conclusion: Lucretia Miller is under the thrall of a Grand Relic—her staff, at least, and all the others as well by now—and has been, probably, for the last three years. If not longer.

Analysis: Lucretia is going to die if they don’t do something. They’re potentially all going to die, regardless, but Lucretia… it seems a bit more present.

He walks up to Angus and Davenport, and they look over at him. Angus nods, then turns back to Lucretia, his face pinched up in a scowl, his eyes flitting between Lucretia, the staff, and the wall of magic that surrounds her.

“Lucas Miller? Is that you?” Davenport asks. “We were told you were dead!”

“Well,” Lucas says slowly; “The Bureau’s pet menaces seemed to think I was safer if I was presumed dead, but… None of us are safe right now, so. I came to help out.”

“Lucas, you helped build this place,” Davenport urges. “Do you know where Lucretia could have hidden anything—anything large. A ship—it’s—”

“The Starblaster, I know,” Lucas says, taking another step forward. He meets resistance about three feet away from the barrier. “I know about your ship. Lucretia told mom everything… Lucretia, Lucretia, what’s happening?”

“She’s not going to answer you,” Davenport says. “And—you _know_ **everything**? She _told_ you?”

“Of course she did—why isn’t she going to answer?”

He turns his head, looking down at Davenport, who looks up at him solemnly and shakes his head. “Lucas, you… you handled the Philosopher’s Stone, you know what just _one_ of those things do if your will isn’t strong enough against it… Imagine being influenced by more than one. Lucas, where is the ship? Do you know? Any secret rooms, secret passageways? You do.”

Lucas pushes up against the resistance. His hands slide over it, vibrating against his skin like an engine. It’s warm and solid, and it fluctuates in opacity, milky white tendrils spreading out from where his fingers touch the barrier. 

“Lucas,” Davenport calls. “If you know everything, then you know how _imperative_ it is for this world to get the ship back—and the Light.”

“She doesn’t see us, does she?” Lucas asks.

“No,” Angus answers quietly. “She doesn’t. She won’t answer when we call her.”

“Lucretia,” Lucas calls, knocking his fist up against the barrier. “Lucretia! If we can get in, can’t we just—could we take it?”

Angus shakes his head in silence. “No, sir,” he answers slowly. “She told me once that once… once the relics are in use, they have to be… surrendered. She won’t put it down.”

“If we can’t get her to give it up on her own,” Davenport says softly. “We’re… going to have to force her. And Lucas, you… you know how forcing it ends up. You need to prepare yourself for that.”

Lucas freezes, his heart pounding hard in his ears. Phandalin. Those women from Goldcliff. His mother,  having to hold her down as she screamed as he pulled it from her hands just to give her some peace, her nails on his arms and her sobbing as he locked it away, only to be lucid by morning. His mother, dead, glassy-eyed, blood trickling from her ears on the floor of the Cosmoscope, shattered glass and bloody hands from where she’d tried to pry out the mirrors to stop whatever killed her. His mother, the Stone, the _Stone_ , his mother’s robotic body darting towards him, her hand heavy on his face as he stumbled, the crunch and creak of crystals spreading in her wake, his mother, dead, gone, never to come back—Lucretia, there, face ashen and drawn, lips moving wordlessly as her staff burns brighter and brighter as she hunches smaller and smaller.

“Let me try,” Lucas begs, “Let me try to get it away from her. I can do it.”

“You can’t reason away the thrall of this thing—this thing has enchanted people until they _die_ , Lucas, if you tell me where she hid the ship, I can promise you she won’t be dead forever.”

“I will _not_ let you kill my mother again!”

Davenport recoils, and Angus blinks owlishly up at him through the cracks in his glasses. A smile spreads across his face, sly and understanding. He steps up beside Lucas, both of them facing Davenport.

 “I know it’s hard,” Davenport snaps, running his hand through his hair. “I know it would mean losing her after what happened with your mother, but if we get out of here, this is— this is the worst that happens. We blow this place, and then the Hunger leaves once we do, once the Light does, and this is as worse as it’s gonna get for you.”

“That doesn’t cut it,” Lucas whispers. “That won’t fly.”

“It has to! It’s all we have—Lucas, where is the ship, I know you know where Lucretia hid it, I know she trusted you and your mother with far more than she had the right to—”

“No,” Angus says. “No sir, I said it before, but you… you _can’t_ leave us here to this.”

“There will be no more **_this_** if we leave with that staff! What do you two not understand about this!?”

“It doesn’t matter, kid. She doesn’t have it,” Lucas says flatly. “It’s not anywhere in the sense he’s thinking.”

“ _What_?!”

Lucas sneers, feeling suddenly vindictive. “It doesn’t work anymore! It wouldn’t work for her, so she gave it to us! It’s not here!”

It’s not exactly true, because in the loosest sense, the ship _is_ the base. But the satisfaction of watching his face drain overwhelms him. But it’s true, Lucretia couldn’t get the ship to fly—he remembers her telling Maureen, mournful. _I can’t get it to fly anymore—or I’d show you, Mar. I can’t do it alone anymore._ But it’s not like they gutted it, or put it somewhere he couldn’t let Davenport go—but he refuses to, on principle.

Davenport seems to realize that he’s lying because he shakes his head and gestures angrily at Lucretia in her sphere of magic.

“Listen, I understand, I get it, it hurts! But, you shouldn’t even know who we are! You shouldn’t be here, this shouldn’t be like this—I, Lucretia overstepped her authority and she has to face that now, I know you two are fond of her—Lucas, I know you and you mother were… _close_ to her, but this was not supposed to happen.”

“Close?” Lucas splutters, “Close!? Don’t you—don’t you discount them! Don’t you sell them short like that! They were—Lucretia _loved_ my mother, she _adored_ her, and don’t you—they got married! You were there! You were there, you saw them, Mom loved—Lucretia loved—she loved us, she loved us! She loved us,” he repeats to himself, eyes hot and stinging. “Lucretia loved my mother, and she loved me like I was her son, so don’t you _dare_ —”

“I’m sorry, but you’re doing yourself, and this world, a disservice by deluding yourself into thinking that Lucretia was capable of being anything but calculating—she’s been under the thrall of this thing for a decade. These things twist you, you've seen it now, the effect it had on her is immeasurable. Even after a reset, she might never be the same. She doesn't, she doesn’t have the _faculty_ to love. If she did, we wouldn't be here, wouldn't have had—if she loved _us_ at all, she wouldn't have so flagrantly and blatantly disrespected _our_ decision!”

“That’s not true,” Angus whispers, “Sir, that’s not true. Miss Lucretia loves you and us—”

“She gathered you up like sticks to throw at the whims of these relics! To the Hunger! She’s known for a year it was coming! She made herself a toy army of people! She fed you lies, she fed you empty promises! Lucas, we scouted out the Miller laboratory the second we knew it existed—I went down to meet your father personally!”

Davenport throws a hand out towards Lucretia’s shield, “Do you think she didn’t realize from day one who you were! Who your mother was! She knew you, she knew Maureen Miller and what you two could _do_! She picked you, picked you to use as her toys, fed you a diet of lies and magic and deception to feed the Light what it wanted! And us, well, you saw—you saw what she did to _me_. If Maureen Miller had lived, Lucas, she would do the very same thing. And didn’t she, didn’t she do just that?”

Lucas clenches his jaw, turning his head away like he’d been hit. It’s an old argument, one he’d had with Lucretia, one he’d had with his mother—the Bureau is a cult, the Bureau is an army, the Bureau is a front for something insidious. She’s using them, she’s using their connections, she’s lying to them.  Lucretia, straight shouldered and even-voiced, whispering words that it sounded like she only half believed.

But it wasn’t always like that. Before the Stone, before the Bureau, before Lucretia started wearing the staff across her back, before she went out with Maureen each week, dressed in finery and trying to wheedle rich old men who knew people who died in the Wars out of their gold, he saw the fire of conviction in her eyes. Before, when he saw her weep over the destruction Raven’s Roost with his mother, sob when she heard of a mass poisoning in a town he’d never heard before. When she cried at night for people they didn’t know, when she fought tooth and nail with Maureen just to use a Stone of Farspeech to contact this man who is so quick to discount her merits.

“You were _there_ ,” Lucas says softly. “You were there when Mom and Lucretia got married. You can’t pretend you weren’t; that it didn’t happen. That it wasn’t _real_ then. I get it, you’re angry with her and you have a right to be, but—have you ever, have you ever been in exile? Really and truly in exile? I have. Me and mom were, and she was too. You’re so alone that you think you might go insane, you wake, restless and wonder what your purpose is. You ache for even the slightest scrap of love, of attention, of validation. She might have chosen the terms of her exile, but don’t think she didn’t suffer. She was alone, honestly utterly alone before she found us, and to deny her the _one_ thing she took delight in, that’s not—that’s not _fair._ ”

“Listen to me! She wouldn’t have been alone if she’d just listened to us! If she had trusted in us instead of her own—her own _pride!_ We’re going home, I’m putting an end to this now. She’s leaving. We’re leaving. She was told her shield would not work; she was told that she had no support! We told her! This was an exercise in vanity on her part, to think that she knew better than her commanding officers—and, this has got to end if there’s going to be _any_ hope in saving this plane, in saving the whole damn universe! And she knew that!”

_I knew it was going to fail, but… he was so proud of it, so I just told him I misread the components._

“Sometimes,” Lucas says, his hand finding Angus’ shoulder, “Sometimes you have to blow the garden up on your own to learn.”

_But how else would he learn? If you make the mistakes for him, Maureen?_

Davenport splutters, brow creasing, “What the fuck—”

“…Luke?”

Lucas freezes, fingers clenching down. His throat tightens and his stomach drops and his mouth goes dry. He closes his eyes, fighting the shaky urge to sit down and cry.

No one’s called him Luke since Maureen died.

“Luke?” Lucretia whispers again. “Lucas?”

He hasn’t heard Lucretia call him Luke since their days in the floating laboratory, their rooms side by side, when he would emerge from his room in the morning to find his mother and Lucretia laid side-by-side on the floor, legs tangled up as they read out their newest sets of notes—Maureen’s on gemstones and magic refraction, Lucretia’s on mysterious magic and disappearances and geological features. They’d look at him as he inched past, sleepy and grumpy, and Maureen would tease him about staying up late and Lucretia would laugh and tell her to take pity on him until he had coffee.

He never appreciated it enough, he never appreciated them enough. He never knew how happy he and his mother were in their floating home until she was gone, until she was ruined, until she wandered its halls, her hair an uneven cloud of curls and her fingers dragging against the walls as she hummed absently, the Cosmoscope assembling itself with a swiftness that almost scared Lucas—but he wasn’t _allowed_ to be afraid, he’d told himself, since he’d found the Stone for her. He hadn’t realized it, hadn’t acknowledged he was scared, until it was too late. It was too late, and his mother was lost, and now… he thinks Lucretia had already been lost then, too.

All of his family, all of them, lost to this senselessness. Lucian first, and forgotten, and then Maureen, his brilliant, loving mother, and Lucretia, her wryly demure wife and his stepmother who taught him about the magic that would ultimately become the Siphon, who held the ichor to his lips because Maureen had cried when it came time, cried because of the horror of what he was about to know, of the weight they were taking up. Who rubbed his back as he cried too—and now he’s being told that he’s going to lose her, too?

No, that he has to _give_ her up?

Hell no. Hell. No.

He turns and kneels forward at the crux of Lucretia’s spell. “I’m here,” he says softly. He puts his palms up against the spell  once more and tries to feel for seams, for cracks, but there are none, because Lucretia was nothing but meticulous.

“Luke,” she says again, blinking slowly at him.

He wants to cry. It’s just like his mother all over again.

He remembers finding her a few weeks before the Cosmoscope was finished, kneeling in the shattered remains of a glass plate that fit over the gemstones, looking down at the blood covering her hands—where it touched the Stone it turned to crystal, blood-drop rubies that rolled across the floor and sounded like rain. She looked up at him, eyes wide as he yelled, and he remembers that his voice died, and his knees had hit the ground so hard he bruised for weeks because Maureen didn’t recognize him until he grabbed her and shook her.

 She’d looked straight at him and hadn’t known who he was, and _that_ was when he began to fight, began to tug it from her hands every night and went to Lucretia, begging her to come and see Maureen, to set aside their differences because his mother was ill, wasn’t right, and it was his fault she died. He’d been unable to impress just how bad Maureen was, why she was in such poor state, and Maureen and Lucretia had fought instead of making up. If he’d been sooner, if he’d been more coherent, less afraid of the consequences, maybe Maureen would still be here. He doesn’t know.

But he knows this: Maureen had barely recognized him in the deepest haze of the thrall, but she could be coaxed up and out of it if he took the Stone from her.  

Lucretia, though, does. He doesn’t know why—doesn’t know why she can recognize him with seven of the damn things, and his mother couldn’t with one. But she recognizes him and that’s a start. It’s more of one, even, than he had with his mother.

An observation: Lucretia hasn’t reacted the entire time they were there, when Davenport yelled at her or when they were talking about things from before her time here on Faerun. But she knew who he was.

A hypothesis, then: Lucretia is under the thrall, but like his mother’s last weeks, she recognizes him. It gets better when it's at it's worst, and abates when the source is removed completely—but it has to be taken away _entirely_. He had a solid two weeks of Maureen back before she found where he’d hidden the Stone, used it, and died.

An addendum: If he can get the Light from her, then maybe, maybe Lucretia Miller, the woman who laughed at him when he blew his own eyebrows off, the woman who spun his mother around under a canopy of honeysuckle in the deep summer, who broke into their goddamn lab because she was desperate and dying and should have never crossed paths with them, is still there.

Test one:

“Lucretia, they’re telling me you have to stop doing this spell,” he says, licking his dry lips.

He flinches as Lucretia’s face goes from slack and dazed to something furious. The magic flares around her, the shield going from opaque to translucent and back, the staff glaring in her hands, throwing the shadows of her face in sharp relief.

“They won't listen! They never listened to me, but I can save them, I can protect them, listen to me—I did it to keep you safe, why don't you trust me, what did I do to lose your trust in me, I saved you before, I did it before, I can do it now— I never would have done it if I wasn't sure it would work, I never would have,” she cries.

“Listen to me, and this is an _order_ , Lucretia—“

Davenport’s voice cuts off and Lucas turns and sees Angus pointing his wand at the man with a shaking hand.

“I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, sir, but you, you're not helping; you're making it worse,” he says, voice trembling. “It's just Silence, sir and I’m so sorry…”

Lucas nods absently and tunes out Angus’ anguished apologies and turns back to Lucretia, whose voice has risen into an almost senseless scream.

Test two:

“Lucretia,” he says softly. He pauses, feeling awkward—he'd never used any of his mother’s pet names for her, never called her anything but her name but. But. This is necessary, even though it feels weird. “Lucy. _Lucy_ , look. Look at me. Do you remember me?”

She falls silent. He can hear her labored breathing, see her shoulders heave.

He remembers her, sprawled out on the ground, blood seeping out of her body, somehow more vital and alive then than she is now. She was fighting then, he thinks. She’s not now. She’s just barely even floating.

“You're alive,” she says slowly. “Lucas… what? What?”

“Ma’am, I told you I thought he was!” Angus mutters in exasperation. Lucas continues to ignore him.

“Your three idiots convinced me it would be super fun to fake my own death,” Lucas says without thinking.

A shudder ripples across her body and Lucas swears to himself. It's just like Maureen, just like those terrible two months all over again; there are things that trigger the thrall more than others. Lucretia's seem to be anything relating to her previous life, to her time as the Director.

“Lucretia,” he says quickly. “Look at me. Hey.”

She fixes her eyes on him. He presses against the barrier, mind racing.

Test three:

“Remember the garden? Remember it? The honeysuckle is blooming. It grew back just fine, even though we blew up a damn engine in it,” he says, laughing softly. “It grew back twice as thick.”

“Maureen was worried it wouldn't,” she whispers. “I told her it would, but she cried. I caught her, late, out and wandering out there, she was so upset we blew up the garden again…”

“It's a glorified weed,” Lucas says. “Of _course_ it grew back, geesh, Mom was such a sap. You know why she was so upset, right?”

Lucretia looks at him, her eyes blank; once, Lucas knew she would laugh and shake her head at the question, bashfully amused at Maureen’s sentimentalism. He begs the universe to let her remember, remember this one thing, this relatively slight, maudlin detail of their life before the Bureau began, of the heady smell of honeysuckle in June and the sloppy, unrestrained look of utter adulation  on his mother’s face and the way it was mirrored right there on Lucretia’s, the way Lucretia shrieked as Maureen picked her up and spun her through the leaves.

“Remember,” he begs her, “Lucretia, please. You know—mom loved that honeysuckle, you know why, please, for me, for Mom, remember.”

“Oh,” Lucretia whispers. “It—she, we—the wedding.”

“Yeah,” Lucas agrees, nodding. “Yeah. The wedding.”

“We… distilled the nectar, right?” she asks.

Lucas wants to swear, because here he is thinking about them actually getting married like a damn sap, and Lucretia, _of course_ , remembers the alcohol afterwards. “You did,” he says, laughing as the first of the tears begin to slide down his face. “Mom started singing halfway through the after party, lifted Brian right of his feet too as she sung that _awful_ ballad about the founding of Neverwinter.”  

Lucretia nods, lifting her head up, her lips trembling into something resembling a small smile.

His hands slip against the barrier, fingers tingling from sinking into the magic. Angus gasps behind him.

Results. But the outside noise pulled Lucretia away from her brush against clarity, and her eyes glaze over again, brows pinched in something like confusion.

“What?” she whispers, “What? What was I…?”

Conclusion: Like before, Lucretia can be distracted from the thrall. It takes considerable effort, but it can be done.

“The mint is doing good too—took over everything,” he continues quickly. “You know how mom loved her weeds.”

“Misplaced plants,” Lucretia answers after a second’s pause. “She loved the garden… she didn’t want to leave it when… we came up here.”

“Lucretia, she's buried there,” he says softly. “I never told you; I'm sorry.”

The barrier flickers and he's inside. And it’s like being hit by a train.

The first thing he feels is heat—the magical energy that her staff radiating puts out enough heat that Lucas’s face breaks out into a sweat, his mouth dry and his eyes tingling.

And then light, bright white and sudden, and then as soon as it’s there, it’s gone and it’s replaced by the roar of voices.

 _Protect them you can protect them you can protect them all, from all harm, all harm, everything, they’ll be safe **The Hunger can starve if you do this, this is the right thing, they’re foolish for thinking otherwise,**_ **so much work to do so much yet so much has been lost, faster, Lucretia, faster,** _they didn’t listen and they suffered but you can make it right and they’ll love you again and forgive you, **you were lonely so lonely why don’t they realize that,**_ **you can make them see you, you can make them see you, starting with the Miller boy,** _they’ll all be safe, you’ll save them all and then they’ll see you, they’ll see you, they’ll stop doubting, **you’ve survived worse than this, keep going, keep going, what do they know, they’ve not seen the things you have,**_ **ten years in an umbrella and she _doubts_ you?! ** _keep going keep going it will work they will be safe keep going keep going_

And:

_I was lonely, lonely, I miss them, I miss them so much, I did it all for them, I didn’t mean for it to be like this, I just want to live in a world where they’re happy, so many people lost, so many people died, we never wanted this, I never wanted this, but I told them I told them, I told them! How dare she, how dare she disappear and then have the gall to tell me I’m wrong, how dare they? He promised, he promised me we’d try, it didn’t work so why, why, why—she promised too—she promised and they’re still— They decided this was it, not me, but I don’t want to leave, I want them to be safe, I can protect them, I can save them, I’ve been protecting them all this time, I saved them all before, this is nothing, keep going keep going…_

And:

 _You broke me, you broke me and caused me to do terrible things in your names, **no one wanted me they wanted the power and you will pay,**_ **you will use me as I am meant to be used and we can change the course of the whole universe, the whole system and you will want me,** _you have wanted me all this time, you need me for this, you need me whole, it **hurt it hurt and you will pay, starting now, starting now, do it, keep pouring yourself out, it will work if you sacrifice enough** , if you  keep going keep going keep going—_

And:

_They hate me they hate me they hate me I knew they would but he wanted me dead he wanted to kill me and she left us all and she’s talking like she runs it all and I worked so hard I gave up so much I worked so hard and I knew it I knew it they could go on without me after all, after all this time, they don’t, they don’t trust me they don’t care don’t talk to me like I’m stupid I’m not stupid I know I know I know but I would rather it all be gone I don’t want to start over anymore I don’t want to watch people die anymore I don’t want this I don’t want this I don’t want don’t want don’t want_

**You will want me. You need me. You lost so much but I can give it back Lucretia. I can give it back. I can level cities for you, I can raise illusions and forests and all the land under your feet, I can change their hate into love, I can turn the time back on you once more and I can bring you back those you’ve lost, I can protect them all. You want and need me. Use me and I will create what you need me to be.**

All of the voices overlap, a screaming cacophony in his mind.

He crumbles to the ground, falling onto his hands and knees in the sparkling water. It’s worse, it’s worse than the Stone alone—he can hear Lucretia’s voice mixed in with the others, the familiar thread of the Stone, the voice of a young girl, and the various other calls of male and female voices, all loud and grating and _needy_ in his ears.

_No not Lucas, not Lucas, no no no no—_

And it’s like he can hear her—outwardly, Lucretia doesn’t seem to even realize he’s there, but he hears her plead alongside the running threads of want and need and command and bitterness.

He hauls himself upright.

**_Lucas Miller. I know you. I can do all that I promised before. Endless mirrors to endless planes, discovery beyond measure. Maureen Miller returned once more to you. With my full power returned, I can ease the sickness of her mind, the hunger that devoured her whole can be slaked— take me up, take me up with this woman whom you love, and you can use me as I am meant, not the silly half power you first had—_ **

He reaches out and covers Lucretia’s hands with his own. “Let go,” he says. “Let it go. This isn’t the way.”

“I worked for this,” Lucretia whispers. Tears slide down her face. “I gave it all up. My family. My friends.  You. _Maureen_.”

He works her fingers with his own, slowly prying them open-palmed. “I know,” he says. “I know. But they’re here. They’re back. I’m back.”  

“They won’t listen to me.”

They clasp the Light between them, loose fingered and mirrored in posture. Sweat drips down Lucas’ neck, and the screaming in his head is so loud, so loud—it would be so easy to listen. He knows how Lucretia fell into this pit, how his mother fell too. How he almost fell, saved only by Maureen’s violence and shattered mental state.

“What else is new, Lucretia?” he asks, and she gives a weak laugh, slumping forward.

He presses his forehead to hers, feeling her cold skin against his own fevered forehead.

“Lucas, you can’t take it, it’ll kill you,” she says.

“No, I’m good,” he says, curling his fingers around it. “It already offered me everything I wanted once, and… the results were, quite frankly, shit. Mom isn’t coming back,” he whispers, throat closing up with sorrow. Tears well in his eyes. “She’s not coming back, Lucretia, and there’s nothing it can offer me now. If it tells you it can give her to you, it’s _lying_. Everything else? It’s nothing I can’t invent myself, nothing I can’t imagine on my own. Nothing I haven’t already tried. Let me take this. Let me have this, let it go. Rest. Share the burden. Move on. Forgive. That’s all mom ever wanted for us both.”

“We were such stubborn creatures, Lucas.”

“I know,” he says. “I’m so sorry, I hurt you because mom was hurting.”

She reaches up, her hand shaking and slow, and cups his cheek softly. “I’m sorry I never realized how badly I hurt you—after, after we formed the Bureau… I don’t remember when, but one day, there was a voice that… it sounded so familiar that I thought it was just me…”

“I forgive you,” Lucas swears. “And so did Mom. And if the Millers can forgive you—” Lucretia snorts, and his heart soars. “Then those idiots can too. Your friends. Because listen, _I’m_ the only family you need. Well. Me and that boy detective kid, I guess I can share.”

And he curls his fingers completely around the staff and very gently tugs it from Lucretia’s hands.

The barrier shatters like glass, falling and shattering in a wave of light and sound that makes Lucretia gasp. She slumps against him, and Lucas leans back, holding the staff over his head so it won’t touch her—he knows if she touches it again, it’ll be like Maureen’s last day all over, and there will be no more attempts at saving her.

“Take the damn thing, take it!” he shouts, “Take it and get it away from us—”

“How did you—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Lucas spits at Davenport as it’s lifted from his hands. He watches as the gnome shudders as the staff touches his hands, and there’s a brief second of glazed eyes and a twitch of his brow that makes Lucas nervous, but then it passes.

“The Hunger,” Lucretia murmurs, voice weak. “It’s still… I don’t want to leave.”

“You’re not,” Lucas says, glaring at Davenport. He’s relieved that Angus, now at their side as well, is sending just a fierce glare at Davenport as well. “Mom always said that there’s never just two ways to do something. We’ll figure something else out.”

“Oh no,” Lucretia says as she slumps further against him. “I’d like my base to remain semi-intact.”  

And  then she faints.

Davenport opens his mouth to say something, but both Angus puts his fingers to his lips and Lucas goes _shoo_ , and he rolls his eyes, “Fine! Fine! We will try one more thing! Fuck it if I know what it is, but we will try _one_ thing! And if it doesn’t work, you show me where our goddamn ship is!”

“Yeah, whatever,” Lucas says. Angus snorts and leans up and whispers in his ear and he laughs, “Yeah. Actually. That _is_ where it is.”  


End file.
